We also wanted to be in the film industry, meet people, and be connected in order to be filmmakers. Greenfield explained in a 2012 interview that they wanted writing tools and “we figured other writers would want those tools too. The pair worked various odd jobs in film and television before forming their company, Screenplay Systems. The program was developed by Chris Huntley and Stephen Greenfield, who met as film students at USC. The alternative was hitting the spacebar until it popped off its hinges. Writers would still write in WordStar or Microsoft Word, but they would add “tags” that Scriptor would read and interpret to format the text into a screenplay. Even that, though, was not an all-in-one app the way we think of screenwriting software today. That was until Scriptor launched in January 1983 at $495 a unit, over $1,400 in today’s dollars. Making sure character names were above their dialogue at 3.7 inches from the left side of the page, parentheticals (or wrylies) were 3.1 inches from the left, and dialogue was properly spaced from the right and left margins-users would have to do all this manually. That is, there was no floppy disk on the market that you could buy, stick into your computer system, and then have an easy-to-use platform that would let you write a screenplay and format it properly. There was no word processing software specifically for screenwriters at this time. Whether they were still learning how to turn a computer on or they already knew how to hack a mainframe, if a writer wanted to hammer out a screenplay on a newfangled Compaq Plus Portable, an IBM 5150, or something called an “Apple II,” their options were limited. In the era of Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters, over half of adults who used a computer at home said that they were “still learning to use it.” They were also decidedly middle class, between 25 and 44 years old, had college educations, worked managerial, technical, or white-collar jobs, and reported over $25,000 a year in income-the rough equivalent of $71,263 in 2022. Census Bureau reported only eight percent of households owned a computer (compared to 92% in 2018). Paper had been invented and the printing press, too, and with it, a little brother called “the typewriter.” It was on these, for the first seventy-odd years of Hollywood filmmaking, that the screenplays for early film classics would be written.īut by the 1980s and 1990s, screenwriters began to adopt computers as their writing tool of choice. The early novelists wrote by hand, using quill pens to write on parchment or vellum. Surveying the history of Screenwriting Software
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